IDLE REFLECTIONS ON A CD

The recorder and electro-acoustic music are both twentieth century inventions.

The case of the recorder is one of re-invention, of rescuing the instrument from museums. This process of recuperation nonetheless involved, as did developments in electro-acoustic media, phases of experimentation, trial and error, ideological clashes, chance discoveries and so on.

The challenge for the electro-acoustic pioneers was to create a new means of expression with a patchwork of borrowed aesthetics and homespun technology. Recorder players, meanwhile, had to rediscover the fingering, articulation, construction techniques and other aspects of museum pieces that had not been played for two hundred years.

The chronologies of these two projects coincide to a considerable degree. Rudimentary efforts were made before the First World War: in Italy the Futurists Russolo and Piatti presented their intonarumori (devices for making noise), while in England a concert was given using sixteenth century recorders with the thumb-hole covered with stamp-paper because nobody knew what it was for. The 1920's saw the start of systematic investigation: León Thérémin presented his precursor to the synthesiser, and the first modern recorder was constructed by Arnold Dolmetsch. Then, following the Second World War, came the explosion of activity in both areas, aided and prompted by technical and social factors.

Both camps found, or placed, themselves on the margin of mainstream musical culture, and their activities took place in societies, associations and festivals dedicated to their speciality. Their work was increasingly conceived as an alternative to, often a direct critique of, the reigning musical culture. In the studios of Paris (from 1947) and Cologne (1951) attempts were made to conquer hitherto unheard sound-worlds supposedly destined to supplant the old worn-out ones, while recorder-players, harpsichordists, violists and other champions of original instruments proposed a return to a lost or squandered world which they viewed as purer and less corrupt.

One ideological nexus between the two groups concerns a revision of the role of the performer. In musique concrète and electronic music the performer simply disappears: one of electronic music's aims was to achieve parametric exactitude beyond the capacity of human performers, and those making musique concrète focused their attention specifically outside the range of sounds produced by human performers playing musical instruments. Within the field of "original instruments", historical performance criteria began to curb performers' prerogatives and liberties, replacing them with norms of "interpretative correctness". This latter concept, if taken to the logical extreme of conceding validity to just one way of playing a work, coincides with another aspect of concrete and electronic music: that performances of a work will be, or should aspire to be - like a work composed on magnetic tape - always exactly the same.

The historical and cultural conditions and factors that had led, in the eighteenth century, to the eclipse of the recorder by the transverse flute, are precisely those which began to change with the advent of electro-acoustic music. To simplify, the recorder, the harpsichord and the viol family lost their practical hegemony when secular art music ceased to be an activity undertaken by small groups in private and became a matter of public concerts in large halls. Performers and audience began to perceive themselves as separate groups (previously people had simply taken turns at being one or the other), economic factors required that the audience be as numerous as possible, the sound of the music had to be more powerful to fill large concert halls, and the music itself more spectacular and dramatic so as to appeal to a passive audience without musical training.

In many respects, the modus operandi of electro-acoustic music resemble those of the period when the recorder was at its apogee. Musical activity once again took place almost exclusively in small spaces and with a high proportion of practitioners among the audience. Mathematics regained its status (lost during the Renaissance) as music's twin science, and music theory began to concern itself once more with the physical laws of sound. Alternative scales and temperaments were investigated for almost the first time since 1691, when Werckmeister had established the theoretical basis for equal temperament. We witness too the reappearance of the composer-technician or composer-artisan, manipulating the very material of sound just as did Hotteterre (c.1680-c.1760), renowned composer, theoretician and recorder constructor, and author of notable innovations in all these fields.

The recorder, re-launched in the twentieth century, required an identity not based exclusively in the distant past. The search for a contemporary repertory began just as certain composers started using investigations carried out in electro-acoustic studios as a means of renewing instrumental and vocal technique. Work done on timbre, transients, micro-rhythm, collage and superimposition of textures all found their way into compositional strategies and extended playing techniques.

Given the extended hiatus in its history, coinciding with the Classical and Romantic periods, composers writing for the recorder was all the more needful of this new source of inspiration. The fact that, in general, composers too sought to free themselves from Romantic aesthetics and rhetoric meant that the recorder, devoid of precisely these connotations, suited them well.

In addition, the recorder’s construction, based on the simplest principles, makes it ideal for this sort of treatment. Its basic tone is pure, with a strong fundamental, so that timbral alterations are particularly effective. Since it has no reed, its articulation is especially rapid which, combined with the fact that the fingers are in direct contact with the instrument, makes a whole range of effects easily executable: glissando, flutter- tonguing, micro-intonation, vocal effects, finger- and other special vibratos, multiphonics, playing two instruments at once, and so on.

A sketch, then, of two paths that cross, not for the first time, in this compact disc. May the encounter be fruitful!

Benjamin Davies